ir power over the
imagination had done most to keep up the whole system of ideas connected
with supernatural agency, had been ascertained to take place in so
regular an order as to admit of being predicted with a precision which
to the notions of those days must have appeared perfect. And though an
equal degree of regularity had not been discerned in natural phaenomena
generally, even the most empirical observation had ascertained so many
cases of an uniformity _almost_ complete, that inquiring minds were
eagerly on the look-out for further indications pointing in the same
direction; and vied with one another in the formation of theories which,
though hypothetical and essentially premature, it was hoped would turn
out to be correct representations of invariable laws governing large
classes of phaenomena. When this hope and expectation became general,
they were already a great encroachment on the original domain of the
theological principle. Instead of the old conception, of events
regulated from day to day by the unforeseen and changeable volitions of
a legion of deities, it seemed more and more probable that all the
phaenomena of the universe took place according to rules which must have
been planned from the beginning; by which conception the function of the
gods seemed to be limited to forming the plans, and setting the
machinery in motion: their subsequent office appeared to be reduced to
a sinecure, or if they continued to reign, it was in the manner of
constitutional kings, bound by the laws to which they had previously
given their assent. Accordingly, the pretension of philosophers to
explain physical phaenomena by physical causes, or to predict their
occurrence, was, up to a very late period of Polytheism, regarded as
a sacrilegious insult to the gods. Anaxagoras was banished for it,
Aristotle had to fly for his life, and the mere unfounded suspicion of
it contributed greatly to the condemnation of Socrates. We are too well
acquainted with this form of the religious sentiment even now, to have
any difficulty in comprehending what must have been its violence then.
It was inevitable that philosophers should be anxious to get rid of at
least _these_ gods, and so escape from the particular fables which stood
immediately in their way; accepting a notion of divine government which
harmonized better with the lessons they learnt from the study of nature,
and a God concerning whom no mythos, as far as they knew, had yet be